Keith Olbermann exposes the money behind the resistance to health care reform - MUST SEE

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Keith Olbermann, raring to go after a returning from his vacation, delivers a blistering special comment on Republicans -- and Blue Dog Dems -- who have become wholly-owned subsidiaries of the health insurance industry:

Some highlights:

PBS pointed out that the health and insurance industries are spending more than a 1,400,000 dollars a day, just to destroy the "public option" - the truly non-profit, wieldy, round-up and not round-down, government, from helping you pay your medical bills with about a billionth of the recklessness with which it is still paying Halliburton and its spin-offs to kill your kids.

And much of this money is going to, and through, Republicans.

But that’s the real point tonight. Not all of it is going through Republicans. Because the evil truth is, the Insurance industry, along with Hospitals, HMO’s, Pharma, nursing homes — it owns Democrats, too.

Not the whole party.

They’ve called themselves "Blue Dogs," and they are out there, hand- in-hand with the Republicans, who they are happy to condemn day and night on everything else, throatily singing "Kumbaya" with the men and women who were bought and sold to defend this con game of an American health care system against the slightest encroachment.

Senator Max Baucus of Montana. Good evening, Senator.

So you’re supposed to be negotiating all this out with the Republicans and the hesitant Democrats, to gain bi-partisanship with a wholly-owned subsidiary of the health sector? Bipartisanship that will get you, what? A total of no votes?

You were not elected to create a Democratic majority. You were elected to restore this country.

You were not elected to serve the corporations and the trusts who the government has enabled for these last eight years.

You were elected to serve the people. And if you fail to pass or support this legislation, the full wrath of the progressive and the moderate movements in this country will come down on your heads.

Explain yourselves not to me, but to them. They elected you. And in the blink of an eye, they will replace you.

If you will behave as if you are Republicans — as if you are the prostitutes of our system — you will be judged as such. And you will lose not merely our respect. You will lose your jobs!

 

 

Firefox 3.5 Released

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Firefox

You may already be running Firefox 3.5, if you grabbed it early from Mozilla’s FTP servers, where it’s been available for a little while now, but if not, head over to Mozilla.com to update. I’ve been using the Beta and the Release Candidate versions for some time, and aside from the usual incompatibility with a few add-ons, I can tell you that 3.5 not only works great, but also packs some useful new features.

For most users, the first thing you’ll notice is how much faster Firefox 3.5 is compared with the previous version. There are a lot of reasons for the speed improvements, but one of them is the new TraceMonkey JavaScript engine that is much more efficient when dealing with resource-hogging web apps. There’s a great post over at WebWorkerDaily that goes into more detail about how that works and what it means.

My personal favorite new feature is the ability to tear off tabs and move them to new windows, something which I used to have to use a plug-in to accomplish. I can’t count how many times I need to do this on a daily basis when I’m referencing something for an article, or for debugging code and HTML.

Here’s a brief list of some of the highlights of the new version to whet your appetite (and more here):

  • Private Browsing and Clear Recent History features.
  • Location aware browsing via geolocation.
  • Gecko engine 1.9.1, with many rendering process improvements.
  • HTML5, downloadable fonts and other new CSS property support, JavaScript query selectors, HTML5 offline data storage for applications, and SVG transforms.
  • Open video support, meaning that you won’t have to download any plug-ins or use external viewers to watch web video content.
  • Improvements to session restore, anti-phishing and malware, the Awesome Bar, and browser customization.

Check out the full Release Notes for 3.5 from Mozilla for a complete list of new features and additions.